The cement bags weighed 90 pounds, dry. Only they weren’t dry. They were soaked by rain. Dallin Hayne had been picking them up off the ground at his Poway home for about an hour on June 1, hoisting them to his chest then dropping them into trash cans.

He lifted the last bag and went to drop it into the trash can, only the bag slipped and landed on his right big toe.

After saying, “Dad, I broke my toe,” Hayne sat down, took off his right shoe and stared at the horizontal indentation etched across the top of his toe.

Then he noticed blood seeping from the bottom of his foot. Hours later in the emergency room, despite drugs to numb the pain, Hayne heard the doctor’s words.

“In all my years, I’ve never seen a bone this badly shattered,” he remembers the doctor saying. “Basically what happened is your joint exploded. It looks like a cloud of dust.”

On Aug. 11 — more than two months after the accident — Hayne’s big toe was amputated at the joint. This, for a then-17-year-old who had played soccer since he was 4, at the club level since he was 7. Who was being recruited by colleges. Whose bedroom is decorated with near-life-size Chelsea soccer posters.

Regarding the rest of Hayne’s story, his club coach, David Cohen, said, “There’s a lot of kids who can benefit from recognizing what’s he’s gone through, how he’s handled adversity.”

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The summer before a high school student’s senior year is supposed to be memorable. Senior portraits. Hanging at the beach. Hanging with friends. Carefree.

Here’s how Hayne spent the summer before his senior year at Poway High: hobbling about in a boot, stuck inside watching “SportsCenter” reruns and movies on 90-degree afternoons; going to the doctor’s office two and three times a week; changing the bandages on his foot.

“(I thought) not only was I going to lose soccer, I thought I was losing my friends, too,” he said. “(The summer) was very long. I felt lonely a lot.”

Knowing how important the big toe on the kicking foot is to a soccer player, Hayne did all he could to save his toe. He took up to 70 pills a day to stimulate blood flow and muscle and bone growth. He sat in an oxygen-enriched hyperbaric chamber at least 20 times for 90 minutes a session.

But by August, doctors said the toe had withered at the joint and should be amputated. Still, the medication and hyperbaric chamber proved beneficial. A doctor originally suggested amputating Hayne’s toe about an inch lower, which would have meant losing the entire toe and part of the ball of his foot.

Could he have played soccer if his big toe had been completely severed?

“I don’t know,” Hayne said. “I think I’d be struggling. I definitely wouldn’t be playing on my club team.”

By mid-October, two months after the surgery, Hayne walked with a slight limp. By early November he was practicing. By December, six months after the surgery, Hayne played in his first games, lining up at midfield for the San Diego Surf Under 18 Academy, one of the top club teams in the country.